I used to recoil at the thought of “networking” for similar reasons as OOP. I’d rather make smalltalk at a conference for exactly as long as it takesb to find someone to go ditch the entire thing with. I don’t wanna talk shop for the sake of talking shop or “networking”, I wanna go for a beer and talk about fully automated luxury gay space communism 🚀
However, now that I’m professionally doing something that I’m interested in, things have changed a bit. I actually enjoy the challenges at my job and actively seek out people that (hopefully) know more about the pitfalls than me. I want to learn from other people! Hopefully I can pay it forward sometime.
But now, all of a sudden, I’m networking. I know what Rebekah does over at Engineering and I know what Claude is trying to accomplish over at $competitor. They in turn know what’s in my roadmap and where I might need support. They also know how I work.
And now, every now and then I get a LinkedIn message alerting me to a professional learning opportunity or a job opportunity. Likewise, I keep Rebecah and Claude in the loop about things that might be interesting to them.